The Confessions of Nat Turner (42 page)

Francis had no children of his own but was the guardian of two nephews, little boys of seven or so, and he did have a wife, Lavinia—a slab-faced brute of a person with a huge goiter and, through the baggy men’s work clothes she customarily wore, the barely discernible outlines of a woman. A winning couple.

Perhaps in reaction to the wife or (it seems more persuasive to believe) goaded by her after or before or during whatever unimaginable scenes took place upon their sagging bedstead, Francis achieved pleasure by getting drunk at more or less regular intervals and beating his Negroes ruthlessly with a flexible wooden cane wrapped in alligator hide. When I say “his Negroes,” however, I should point out that this meant Will and Sam. I cannot tell why it was these two who became the victims of his savagery, unless it was only a matter of simple elimination—the three younger boys perhaps not possessing yet the stamina to take such killing abuse, the two women being likewise invulnerable on account of their advanced age.

As for poor Dred, his brains were all scrambled and he could barely speak. It may be that like a man stalking swamp bear who turns up only muskrat, Francis felt that young Dred was too lacking in distinction to be suitable prey for his ferocity. At any rate, he was able to invent for Dred other means of degradation.

Dred was nineteen years old, so brainless that he was barely able to go to the privy without help. The condition of his poor addled head had been recognized by Francis only after he had bought him, sight unseen, from a trader with no more scruples The Confessions of Nat Turner

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than himself. Dred’s very existence was the walking, living proof of a swindle, and enough to drive his owner to a frenzy. Now responsible for Dred, unable to sell him, and refraining from murder less because of legal restraints than because unprovoked murder of a slave bore a social odium hard for even Francis to abide, he revenged himself for the swindle not by such simple and crude extremes as whipping but by tormenting Dred with unspeakable tricks like causing him once (according to Sam, whom I had no reason to doubt) to copulate with a bitch dog before an assembly of local white trash.

Francis had bought Will and Sam at the Petersburg auction block when they were both around fifteen, and by the time I first encountered them—during periodic rentals to Moore or the idle hours we might spend together in Jerusalem on market day—they had endured their owner’s thrashings for five or six years. Such abuse had caused both of them to run away more often than either of them could remember, and Francis’s alligator-hide whip had left knobs like walnuts on their shoulders, backs, and arms. Francis might have been a moderately prosperous landowner had not his roaring need to inflict misery on his Negroes smothered that logic which must have tried to tell him that halfway decent treatment would keep the pair, however reluctantly, home and busy: as it was, each time Will or Sam, anguished past endurance, took to the woods Francis lost money just as surely as if he had dropped silver dollars down a well. For Will and Sam among the field Negroes he owned were the oldest, the strongest, and most capable. To fill the gap their absence made he was compelled to hire other Negroes at substantial prices he would not have been forced to pay had he restrained his imbecile cruelty.

Furthermore, many if not most of the other farmers in the area were aware of Francis’s savage propensities. (This included Travis, his own brother-in-law, who never once allowed Hark near the Francis farm.) Even when they were not prompted by considerations solely humane (which I must confess some were) the landowners were understandably reluctant to let out any of their field hands to this ruffian who might send back to them a chattel worth five hundred dollars damaged beyond all repair.

Thus whenever Sam or Will ran away, Francis was often unable to obtain replacement and he would be driven to an even greater pitch of rage. Setting off with a jug of brandy, his barbarous tublike shape jouncing and jostling astride a bay mare as he scoured the countryside, he would after several days find Sam or The Confessions of Nat Turner

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Will—or perhaps the fugitives would be returned to the farm by some local poor white eager for the customary reward—and once again they would be thrashed until they were bleeding and senseless and then left for a time locked in the barn until their stripes and welts began to grow scabs and they were ready for work. All in all it was a never-endingly ugly and dispiriting situation. And easily the most sinister aspect of the matter was what this treatment had done not so much to their bodies but to their minds. Of the two Negroes, Sam was the less affected.

Which is to say that brutalized as he was, wounded to the depths of his being, he managed to keep a grasp on reality and—in spite of a wicked temper which caused him to lash out mindlessly from time to time at other slaves—presented more often the outward spirit of an ordinary young field hand, a frolicsome and happy-go-lucky air that among certain Negroes, I have noticed, is a kind of necessary disguise for almost unendurable affliction. But Will was altogether different. A livid stripe like a shiny eel ran the length of his face from beneath his right eye to the tip of his chin. Another blow, inflicted during the same beating, had given his nose the appearance of a black mashed-in spoon. He muttered to himself constantly, incoherently. The torture that had been imposed upon him had made him hate not just Francis, hate not just white men but all men, all things, all creation—and because I myself dwelt within the inchoate universe of that hatred I could not help but come to fear him in a way I had never feared any man, black or white, before . . .

The whole day after Moore’s encounter on the road with Isham we unloaded wood at various places in Jerusalem. Moore had contracted to “store” at each house we visited and at the courthouse and the jail. This meant no disorderly heap of logs thrown in a hodgepodge behind the kitchen but rather a tidy arrangement of cords which it was Hark’s and my duty to stack wherever Marse Jim or Marse Bob wished them stacked. It was monotonous and gut-wrenching labor. This strain, combined with the stifling heat of the town and my continuing fatigue and dizziness, made me stumble often and once I fell sprawling, only to be helped up by Hark, who said: “You jes’ take it easy, Nat, and let ole Hark do de work.” But I kept up a steady pace, retreating as was my custom into a kind of daydream—a reverie in which the brute toil of the moment was softened and soothed by my mind’s murmurous incantation:
Deliver me out of the mire,
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and let me not sink, let not the deep swallow me up, hear me O

Lord, turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender
mercies . . .

At noon Hark and I made our dinner in the shade of one of the wagons, eating cold hoppin’ john—mashed cowpeas mixed with rice—and sat listlessly afterward cooling ourselves while Moore and Wallace went off to visit the townwhore—a two-hundred-pound free mulatto woman named Josephine. The food revived me slightly but I still felt faint and weird, with the mystery and wonder of my vision in the woods lingering not in my mind alone but as if throughout my entire being, my soul, like the shadow of a cloud that has appeared out of nowhere to smudge the bright face of the day. I shivered, the mystery haunted me as if great fingers the size of pine boughs rested on my back, ever so lightly, and a mood of evil premonition stole over me as we went back to work. I could not shake the feeling off while we sweated through the waning afternoon. That night the languor and illness returned, I ached with fever, and as Hark and I lay asleep beneath one of the wagons, parked in a field smelling of sweet mustard and goldenrod, I had dreams of giant black angels striding amid a spindrift immensity of stars.

Then late in the forenoon of the next day after another hot morning’s work, we made our delivery to the market—the last. It was a Saturday, market day, and as usual the gallery was thronged with Negroes from the country who were generally allowed a few idle hours to fritter away while their masters attended to business in the town. After we unloaded the last logs Moore and Wallace went off on some errand and Hark and I retired—he with his pine-strip banjo, I with my Bible—to a shady corner of the gallery where I could meditate on a certain passage in Job which had attracted my curiosity. Hark strummed softly, humming a tune. Quite a few of the Negroes loitering about I had become acquainted with by now, largely because of these market days. Daniel, Joe, Jack, Henry, Cromwell, Marcus Aurelius, Nelson, half a dozen more—they had arrived with their masters from all over the county, had helped load or unload their owners’ produce, and now stood about with nothing to do but ogle the passing bottoms or breasts of the Negro girls of the town, jabbering the while loudly about poontang and pussy, goosing each other and scuffling around in the dust. One or two succeeded with the girls and stole off with them into a field of alfalfa. Others played mumbletypeg with rusty stolen jackknives, or simply drowsed in the sunlight, waking now and then to The Confessions of Nat Turner

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exchange their sorry belongings: a straw hat bartered for a homemade jew’s-harp, a lucky hairball from a cow’s belly for a bag of pilfered snuff. I looked at them briefly, then returned to Job’s racking, imponderable vision. But I found it difficult to concentrate, for although I had recovered somewhat from my fever I could not dislodge the sensation that I had somehow been utterly changed and now dwelt at a distance from myself, in a new world apart. It was noon and Hark offered me a biscuit from a panful he had spirited out of the kitchen of one of Moore’s customers, but I had no stomach for food. Even here in town the air was hazy, smelling of far-off fires.

Suddenly I became aware of a commotion—laughter and shouts from a cluster of white men behind the blacksmith’s stable perhaps fifty yards away across the road. The bare earthen plot at the rear of the stable was the Saturday gathering place for the poor whites of the county just as the market gallery had become the social focus for the Negroes. These white idlers were the rogues and dregs of the community: penniless drunks and cripples, scroungers, handymen, exoverseers, vagabonds from North Carolina, harelipped roust-abouts, squatters on pineland barrens, incorrigible loafers, cretins, rapscallions, and dimwits of every description, they made my present owner by comparison appear to possess the wisdom and dignity of King Solomon.

There by the stable each Saturday with straw hats and cheap denim overalls they gathered in a shiftless mob, cadging from each other quarterplugs of chewing tobacco or snorts of rotgut brandy, palavering endlessly (like the Negroes) about pussy and cooze, scheming out ways to make a dishonest half-dollar, tormenting stray cats and dogs, and allowing the slaves from their market promontory a bracing glimpse of white men worse off—in certain important respects at least—than themselves.

Now when I looked up to find the source of the disturbance among them I saw that they had assembled in a rough circle. In the midst of the circle, perched upon a horse, was the squat, hunched form of Nathaniel Francis, roaring drunk, his round face besotted with swollen pleasure as he gazed down at something taking place on the ground. I was only mildly curious, thinking at first that it was a white man’s wrestling match or drunken fist fight: hardly a Saturday passed without one or the other. But through the baggy pants’ legs of one of the bystanders I saw what appeared to be two Negroes moving about, engaged in doing what I could not tell. Cackles of glee went up from the crowd, wild hoots and cries. They seemed to be egging the The Confessions of Nat Turner

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Negroes on, and Francis drunk in the saddle caused the horse to stamp and prance at the space within the encircling mob, raising an umbrella of dust. Hark had risen to his feet to gawk and I told him that he had better go find out what was happening; he moved slowly off.

After a minute or so Hark came back to the gallery, and the sheepish half-smile on his face—I will never forget that expression, its mixed quality of humor and gentle bewilderment—filled me with a sad foreboding, as if I had known, sensed what he was going to say the instant before his mouth opened to say it.

“Ole Francis he puttin’ on a show fo’ dem white trash,” he proclaimed, loud enough for most all of the other Negroes to hear. “He drunker dan a scritch owl and he makin’ dem two niggers Will and Sam fight each other. Don’t neither of ’em want to fight but ev’y time one of ’em draw back an’
don’t
whop de other, ole Francis he give dat nigger a stroke wid his whip. So dem niggers dey
got
to fight and Sam he done raised a bleedin’

whelp on Will’s face and Will I do believe he done broke off one of Sam’s front teeth. Hit sho is some kind of cock fight.”

At this, all the Negroes within hearing began to laugh—there was indeed something oddly comical about Hark’s
way
of describing things—but at the same time my heart seemed to shrivel and die within me. This was
all
. All! Of the indignities and wrongs that a Negro might endure—blistering toil and deprivation, slights and slurs and insults, beatings, chains, exile from beloved kin—none seemed more loathsome, at that minute, than this: that he be pitted in brutal combat against his own kind for the obscene amusement of human beings of any description—but especially those so mean and reptilian in spirit, so worthless, so likewise despised in the scheme of things and saved from the final morass only by the hairline advantage of a lighter skin. Not since the day years before when I was first sold had I felt such rage, intolerable rage, rage that echoed a memory of Isham’s fury as he howled at Moore, rage that was a culmination of all the raw buried anguish and frustration growing inside me since the faraway dusk of childhood, on a murmuring veranda, when I first understood that I was a slave and a slave forever. My heart, as I say, shrank inside me, died, disappeared, and rage like a newborn child exploded there to fill the void: it was at this instant that I knew beyond doubt or danger that—whatever the place, whatever the appointed time, whoever the gentle young girl now serenely plucking blossoms within a bower or the mistress The Confessions of Nat Turner